Raph’s Website » The tail wags the dog

The tail wags the dog

March 7th, 2007 (Visited 3612 times) Tags:

So, I am sure that by now everyone has seen the news about the Sony Playstation 3 Home service that is getting added this year to the PS3. In short, it looks to me like There.com (not Second Life, IMHO, despite what everyone is saying) added into the PS Live network — multiuser public space and private spaces that display the equivalent of achievements, etc.

I missed the keynote, but supposedly Web 2.0 and so on were referenced; honestly, it doesn’t look like it actually interoperates with the Web, but hey, it does do video and music streaming into the world, plus the avatars can dance. So I sure can’t knock it.

I remember when Live first came out on the 360, I actually said to folks, “you know, if they added virtual apartments to this, it would completely change the playing field here…” Looks like Sony made the big leap.

The thing for me is, this would never have existed without Second Life, I bet. I think this is an example of the tail wagging the dog.

Now, back to finishing my slides for tomorrow!

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Sierra Kilo » Blog Archive » PS3 does MMO? Part Deux wrote on March 8th, 2007 at 8:40 am:

[...] favorite game developers offer more insight to the recent news about Sony’s PlayStation Home for PS3. I think everyone [...]

Sony's 3D universe: "Home" - Second Citizen Forums wrote on March 9th, 2007 at 5:10 am:

[...] Koster’s take on this: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/03/07…-wags-the-dog/ [...]

GigaGamez » Archive Sony Marketing the PS3... in Second Life! « wrote on March 22nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm:

[...] for the PS3, and as Raph Koster noted, we’re in an era where user-created content rules, and the tail wags the dog. What happens next is anyone’s guess. This is living, all right – in a remarkably topsy turvy [...]

GigaGamez » Archive Sony Marketing the PS3... in Second Life! « wrote on March 22nd, 2007 at 4:07 pm:

Techzi » Blog Archive » Sony Marketing the PS3… in Second Life! wrote on March 23rd, 2007 at 6:28 pm:

Sulka Haro said on March 8th, 2007 at 12:19 am:

My reason for pointing to Second Life was that SL is the well known 3D virtual world out there. While the Home might be closer to There than SL, it might do more harm to SL than There. Time will show. My session transcript is also live.

Rich Bryant said on March 8th, 2007 at 1:13 am:

I suspect that the developers of the PS3 system, based in Hokkaido as they are, paid little attention to Second Life and the “download from Sony Store” model certainly doesn’t sound like it.

Also, the video, as pointed out by others before me, looks a great deal like an extremely high-res version of the SWG engine. Second Life can only dream of as many (real) users as PS3 owners even now. That particular dog isn’t attached to that particular tail.

csven said on March 8th, 2007 at 6:35 am:

Yep. The effort to compare “Home” to SL is pretty telling imo.

Relmstein said on March 8th, 2007 at 7:40 am:

Most likely this service was inspired more by the popularity of Myspace then Second Life. I heard that SL was a major buzz game at the GDC this year though so I can see how one could make a connection. Still at the moment the only thing a company might want to copy from SL would be their marketing strategy.

Raph said on March 8th, 2007 at 9:13 am:

“MySpace with virtual apartments” is one of the commonest phrases of the last two years. And in the last six months, “Second Life meets MySpace” has gotten be rising up the charts with a bullet as well.

csven said on March 8th, 2007 at 12:56 pm:

“Still at the moment the only thing a company might want to copy from SL would be their marketing strategy.”

What exactly is their marketing strategy?

Rich Bryant said on March 8th, 2007 at 1:31 pm:

Buy drinks for idiotic journalists until they forget how to check facts.

Mike Rozak said on March 8th, 2007 at 3:05 pm:

All these SL clones remind me of something back in 1997(?). There was a screensaver called point-cast(???) that automatically downloaded news and displayed it on your screen.

It turned into the latest buzzword, “push” internet, insteadl of “pull” web-pages. Windows 98(?) even overhauled the desktop so it’d show you news in the background. I haven’t seen the screensaver (or Win98 desktop) since.

How is having a virtual aparment meaningful/useful? Or the other avatar-like movmeent through info-space. (Remember Microsoft Bob? It was about converting the Windows OS into a space… a house.) I can see the “Gee, that’s cool” factor, but not much more.

csven said on March 8th, 2007 at 4:51 pm:

“Buy drinks for idiotic journalists until they forget how to check facts.”

They bought Shirky drinks? I guess that explains his inability to get past the homepage stats just like the other MSM types.

Thanks. I didn’t realize.

Grimwell said on March 8th, 2007 at 5:53 pm:

This is cool. It’s a positive evolution that pulls from multiple sources and could do a nice job of making the interface for a console very friendly indeed. I think there is substance to it despite the ‘push/pull’ analogy made above — people will enjoy it if the interface is not too obtuse.

StGabe said on March 8th, 2007 at 5:58 pm:

Put me on the “this owes a lot more to MySpace, WoW and XBox live” bandwagon. SL gets trotted out all the time, but more often than not, for all the wrong reasons. I think it’s just a fun virtual space to talk about and a great spawn of Blog drama but overall it’s still pretty niche and isn’t affecting the market that much. WoW has driven home the value of online, accessible spaces to meet friends. MySpace has demonstrated just how badly people want attention through customizable, online expressions of self and Live has demonstrated how public sharing of achievements can help sell games with said achievements.

Rich Bryant said on March 9th, 2007 at 2:41 am:

They bought Shirky drinks?

Nah, he’s not a journalist.

Charles Ellis said on March 9th, 2007 at 5:10 am:

Well, there are obviously major differences between this and Microsoft Bob. For starters, the goals between those two are entirely different. Microsoft Bob was still an OS, meant to allow you to do computing tasks like run your applications, manage your files, etc.
Playstation Home, on the other hand, is all about hanging out and meeting people. As well, the control mechanism is directly intended for navigating a 3D space with an avatar, so it likely won’t be awkward to control.
It may still turn into a gimmick and people will continue to meet over MySpace or whatever else appears, but I bet that a lot of people who have met over other means would hang out a bit in Playstation Home. As for the virtual apartment, I’m not sure. I do know that even with what little I played of EQ2, I really enjoyed decorating my in-game apartment.
This is kind of what I was hoping for from Microsoft when they were talking up the new Xbox Live before the 360 was released. Perhaps now they’ll feel the need to compete with their own 3D space.

Darniaq said on March 9th, 2007 at 6:09 am:

The challenge with this strategy for them is the PS3 itself. Maybe they think this keynote and these plans will drive up sales, but it’s more a question of price in my mind. To buy the PS3 today (not tomorrow, not when Home comes online, but right now) you REALLY need to be almost all about graphics, which means having already invested in HDTV and probably HD-cable at minimum, maybe wanting to replace your DVD library too. The PS3 is a higher barrier of entry not just because of price.

Now, if Home was coming out for the PS2, then, whoa. If I recall there are in excess of 60 million of those worldwide. That’s the sort of huge installed base you want when you activate a fundamentally different user experience like Home.

It’s a great idea. It would have helped them last November my opinion. But it’s relevance is tied to more people buying PS3s in my mind.

The other stuff will follow in time (PC integration, MMOs, etc)

Lacero said on March 9th, 2007 at 8:21 am:

“Put me on the “this owes a lot more to MySpace, WoW and XBox live” bandwagon.”

Habbo Hotel seems the closest fit to me. With no scripting or in game modelling app that I’ve seen I’m not sure when anybody has even mentioned SL.

csven said on March 9th, 2007 at 9:06 am:

“Nah, he’s not a journalist.”

Didn’t say he was. Just that he made the same mistake as the journalists he ripped into by not getting the facts straight either. Better to believe he was intoxicated when he stuck his foot in his mouth, otherwise there’s no excuse.

btw, do we have verifiable “adoption” (not subscription) numbers for WoW? Would still like to see those since Shirky kept citing WoW’s “adoption”.